Journals of Constant Waterman

February 12, 2008

Photo:Flickr/Iheartj

Point Judith, Rhode Island – 14 September
This morning the harbor spreads calmly. Dirty clouds begin to descend; the next two days will prove wet. The fellow in the small O’Day sloop to whom I spoke last week touted the breakfast served at Snug Harbor Marine. The mile and a half each way seems a bit of a swim. I tumble into my Whitehall pulling boat. I take my empty water jug, a towel, clean clothes and, to propitiate the dumpster god, my favorite bag of trash.

The half-hour row both relaxes and invigorates me. Living aboard a twenty-six foot sloop induces lethargy — except when you’re rail down and bending the tiller. I look forward to a good walk following breakfast.

At Snug Harbor Marine, I tuck behind the fuel pier in the shadow of the harbormaster’s shack. Beyond the pier head crouches a squat, block building: the grocery and café. I sit at the counter along with some local fellows and stuff myself with scrambled eggs and hash browns.

The locals discuss the gastronomic propensities of striped bass. As I’m a functional illiterate in piscation, I refrain from participation in their debate. After another coffee, I’m off to see what the waterfront has to offer.

A fish market, a lobster pound, a tackle shop, a head, and a dumpster compliment the café. After testing the head and worshiping briefly at the dumpster, I follow the path that leads to the next marina. This boasts a ship’s store (closed), a brokerage office (ditto), the quietest engine shop I’ve ever encountered, and, look! Showers! Having bathed in my tiny sink the past ten days, I’m nearly ready to try something innovative.

The doors, normally requiring keys issued only to clients, are propped wide open. The cleaning crew has just finished and they’ve left the bathrooms open to air and dry. I scamper back to the Whitehall and row her around the piers to this marina. Two fellows aboard a skiff at the pier teach their engine obscenities. The engine proves a slow learner; they need to repeat the words again and again.

“Mind if I tie up my barge?” I ask.

“Nope,” says one of them, stopping to catch his breath. “You can see how busy it is. Pretty boat ya got there.”

I casually sling my bag across my shoulder and nonchalantly ascend the metal gangway. There’s no one about to challenge my right to be clean. I close myself in and take a long, long shower. There’s more hot water than I’ve seen in a week and a half. I luxuriate beneath it for ten long minutes. I put on all clean clothes. Now this is livin’!

I saunter to the next boatyard where a smart looking steel trawler rests on the ways. Just beyond, the dried out hulk of a wooden trawler languishes in a cradle. The next yard over is rather private: it’s more a back yard than a boatyard. At the uttermost end of the pavement, a fifty-foot, flat top, Elco motor cruiser rests on blocks and poppets.

She’s narrow and sleek and dynamic. Her elegant deckhouse gleams with bright work panels, sparkles with glass. Her hull is dark blue; her vast, mahogany transom glistens with layer on layer of varnish, but there’s no name blazoned across it.

A youngish man and a woman not much older are working on her. The woman comes out of the pilothouse, wiping a varnish brush, and spots me, below.

“Lovely old boat,” I venture.

“Built in forty seven,” she informs me.

“Same year I was commissioned,” I reply.

“I bet you’re in better shape,” she chuckles.

“Long as I get caulked on a regular basis,” I respond.

Illustrated by author

The Elco is getting launched next week. Soon as her topsides get two more coats of blue, and her boot top stripe’s renewed, and the name goes across her transom. She’s heading south to be chartered by her owners.

“You mean she’s not yours?” I ask.

“Don’t I wish,” she answers. She looks ruefully at the brush.

I leave her to her fun. She’s a beautiful creature. The boat, that is. Much later, I notice her name in gilded, Gothic script across her front windows: “Queen o’ Scots.”

She’d belonged to a friend of my father. I’d been invited, at seventeen, to spend six months as her deck hand on a journey up the Hudson River, through the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. I’d pleaded to go, but my father refused to let me forego geometry and English.

Perhaps I’d have started these journals forty years sooner.

About the author: Matthew Goldman has worked as a toolmaker, a woodworker, and a land surveyor. He attended Union College in Schenectady and has taken courses in drama at URI. He has written serious drama, black comedy and farce.

Three of his one-act plays have been staged and his full-length comedy, ‘Shades of Darkness, Shades of Light’, was included in the 2002 Tennessee Stage’s Playwrights’ Festival in Knoxville where it was presented as readers’ theater. His full-length drama, ‘Starting Over’, received honorable mention in the 2002 Writers’ Digest competition. His full-length black comedy about elder abuse, ‘The Cat Lady’, received two Equity staged readings at HRC Showcase Theater in Hudson, NY. His website is at www.constantwaterman.com